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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/25/australia-aukus-subservience-empire-trump-america>
"Once again on this divisive day of national celebration, Australia’s leaders
can be expected to indulge in official monologues of self-congratulation based
on assertions of who we supposedly are as a country and a people.
Notwithstanding the perennial affront to many First Nations people’s
sensibilities each 26 January, Australia will officially talk over the protests
to cast itself as a tolerant, inclusive, egalitarian, self-sufficient, ruggedly
individual nation of mates – always underpinned by a reverence for democracy
and a hardy streak of anti-authoritarianism.
The truth is that many of these traits are not and never have been unique to
Australia or its peoples. But all nations tell stories to themselves – and this
is the national narrative of the (white Australian) federation of 1901 that
grew from violent dispossession after the tall ships arrived as the apex of
invasion in 1788.
Were we to celebrate the national birthday at federation we’d have just turned
125. Hardly part of the old world to be sure, though still disappointingly in
too many ways one of its colonial extensions politically and culturally.
Australia is hardly a neophyte nation either. Celebrated from federation as a
new beacon of bold democracy within the British empire and a bastion of rights
(not least for workers and female voters but never for Indigenous people), but
125 years later we seem more empirically shackled than ever.
Australian republicans have long sought to break the chains with Great Britain,
as largely symbolic as they remain – although on 26 January England and its
first fleet by definition takes awkward centre stage in the celebrations and,
for First Nations peoples and their supporters, the mourning.
And yet today as Australia stops to celebrate itself, more progressive citizens
will be uncomfortably preoccupied with their country’s obsequiousness and
ever-deeper indebtedness to another more powerful empire with its rapidly
eroding democratic institutions, and its threat to global order and peace."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
